All social media platforms allow users to create a group of friends and community with whom the users shares the personal and social information including social activities like posts, recommendations, personal interests etc. Current social media platforms provide a loose model for making an online social contacts including friends, online companions, chat buddies etc. The existing model is mostly user driven. Most social platforms encourage social user to maximize his/her social contacts in order to increase user activity or time on the site thereby increasing their revenue. Most of the current social platform heavily provides friend suggestions to increase social user's circle of friends. Social users perform various activities with online social contacts including sharing personal information, chat and other community activities. Social media platform provides numerous ways to share the data like profile information, comments etc. with their online social contacts. All social media platforms allow the user to create a group of friends and community with whom the user shares the personal and social information including social activities like posts, recommendations, personal interests etc.
Although existing social media sites allow finer control for sharing information, most of the current models require user intervention for leveraging that fine-grain custom control by adding extra filters; often it is a cumbersome process to selectively filter sensitive information. User more often than not ignores safety concerns due to the extra steps required for achieving fine grain controls leaving his/her data vulnerable to the outside world. In most cases, user falls back on his/her past experience and interactions with a person to qualify him/her as a “friend” or ‘social contact’ and establish the “trust” to a friend. A social user is unaware of all the activities of his/her social contacts/friends across various networking social sites. It often results in incorrect/incomplete/false perception about the friend/social contact. Limited information about friend's activities poses challenges in friend profiling. Friendship is often a personal notion in the social world.
There are no tools or processes to objectively decide or suggest a trust worthiness of a friend. This lack of objective trust verification would potentially lead to social user's data exploitation and security issues like identity theft, cyber bully, Cyber stalking, cyber defamation etc.